Building Java Enterprise Applications

Chapter 7. Completing the Data Layer

You’ve made it through the first section of the application, the data structure. Of course, this is simply the raw information used in the application. While it’s almost time to begin coding the next tier of the application, the business layer, it’s worth taking a moment to make sure things are working correctly, and perform a few optimizations and clean-up tasks.

In this chapter, I’ll first look at several items that can help improve the efficiency, performance, and cleanliness of the application code discussed so far. As in the creation of any application, a lot of ground has been covered very quickly. It is worth taking a short break from adding features in order to really wrap up the data layer; those who inherit your code some day will be glad you did. From there, I’ll move on to showing you how to realistically test your application, and write a client for the various beans and the LDAP manager that are in place. This also gives you a chance to populate your data stores, so the examples in the rest of the book will be using the same data as in my version of the application. More importantly, if you’re not familiar with using RMI, JNDI, and contexts with your beans, you’ll see this sort of client in action. At the end of the chapter, you can say you’ve got a complete, functional, polished data layer, which is quite an accomplishment.

Odds and Ends

So far, you have concentrated completely on data layer functionality; while this results in ...